Various types of grills and rotisserie devices are known in the art for progressively cooking each side of a food item such as meat or poultry. It is desirable to automatically turn the food item to provide even cooking, prevent burning, and to make it convenient for an operator to cook the item without having to manually rotate or turn the food item. In a commercial environment, it is also desirable to cook as many food items at one time in order to provide fast, efficient service to a customer.
In prior art rotisseries, however, a plurality of spits or skewers are typically rotated about their own axes and orbited about an oven. This is often accomplished by providing spaced drums or reel plates that are mutually rotated and horizontally support the skewers for rotary motion. Thus, the skewer ends are inserted in the driver that is attached to the reel plate and are connected to an associated planet gear or other mechanism that rotates the individual skewers. Attempts have been made to improve the planetary gearing system that serves to rotate each of the skewers about its own axis. Nevertheless, such systems tend to be complex and costly and have many parts which can perform improperly if clogged with debris, grease or the like. Moreover, the amount of food items that can be cooked at one time is limited because each skewer is intended to support a single "row" of food items.
Therefore, it remains desirable to provide a rotisserie device configured to maximize the number of food items that can be cooked at one time. It also remains desirable to provide an apparatus which can evenly cod machine elements such as planetary gear systems.